Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The village of Shirmal, like most places in the valley, had been stricken by the twin diseases of poverty and fear, that double epidemic which was wiping out the old way of life. The decaying houses seemed actually to be built of poverty, the unrepaired rooftops of poverty, the unhinged windows of poverty, the broken steps of poverty, the empty kitchens of poverty and the joyless beds. The fear was revealed by the striking fact that the women-even Hasina Yambarzal-were all veiled now: Kashmiri women, who had scorned the veil all their lives. The large, gleaming vehicle parked outside the sarpanch’s residence seemed like an invader from another world. Inside the house a veiled old lady who no longer had it in her to be angry at her fate offered such hospitality as she could to the son of Sardar Harbans Singh and the daughter of Boonyi Kaul Noman. Even though nothing was visible of her except her hands and eyes it was evident that she had been a formidable woman in her time and that some remnant of that power lingered on. In a corner behind her sat her withered, milky-eyed octogenarian husband smoking a hookah and filled with the gummy malice of old age. “I am sorry that you see us in this condition,” Hasina Yambarzal said, offering her guests hot glasses of salty tea. “Once we were proud but now even that has been taken from us.” The old fellow in the corner shouted out, “Are they still here? Why are you talking to them? Tell them to go so I can die in peace.” The veiled woman did not apologize for her husband. “He is tired of life,” she calmly explained, “and it is a part of the cruelty of death that it is taking our little children, also our men and women in their prime, and ignoring the pleas of the one person who begs every day for it to come.”

After the events in Shirmal leading up to the death of the iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh, other militants had come by night. They had entered the sarpanch’s house and dragged him out of bed and conducted a trial on the spot, finding him, on behalf of his whole village, guilty of assisting the armed forces, betraying the faith and participating in the ungodly practice of cooking lavish banquets that encouraged gluttony, lasciviousness and vice. Bombur Yambarzal on his knees was sentenced to death in his own house and his wife was told that if the villagers did not cease their irreligious behavior and adopt godly ways within one week the militants would return to carry out the sentence. At that moment Bombur Yambarzal, with a gun at his temple and a knife at his throat, lost the power of sight forever, literally blinded by terror. After that the women had no choice but to wear burqas. For nine months the veiled women of Shirmal pleaded with the militant commanders to spare Bombur’s life. Finally his sentence was commuted to house arrest but he was told that if he ever again cooked the evil Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, or even the more modest but still disgusting Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, they would cut off his head and cook it in a stew and the whole village would be forced to eat it for dinner.

“Tell her what she wants to know,” blind Bombur muttered spitefully, surrounded by smoke. “Then see if she’s happy she came.”

On the morning after Maulana Bulbul Fakh and his men had been slaughtered in the old Gegroo house in Shirmal, Hasina Yambarzal had realized that Shalimar the clown had not returned, and the pony he had borrowed was also missing. If that boy escaped, she thought, then we’d better be prepared for him to come back someday and get even. She thought of his youthful clowning on the high rope, his extraordinary gravity-free quality, the way the rope seemed to dissolve and one experienced the illusion that the young monkey was actually walking on air. It was hard to put that young man into the same skin as the murderous warrior he had grown into. Twenty-four hours later the pony found its way back to Shirmal, hungry but unharmed. Shalimar the clown had disappeared; but that night Hasina Yambarzal had a dream that horrified her so profoundly that she woke up, dressed, wrapped herself in warm blankets and refused to tell her husband where she was going. “Don’t ask,” she warned him, “because I don’t have words to describe what I’m going to find.” When she arrived at the Gujar hut on the wooded hill, the home of Nazarébaddoor the prophetess which afterwards became the last redoubt of Boonyi Noman, she discovered that the putrescent, fly-blown reality of the world possessed a horrific force far in excess of any dream. None of us is perfect, she thought, but the ruler of the world is more cruel than any of us, and makes us pay too highly for our faults.

“My sons brought her down the hill,” she told Boonyi’s daughter. “We laid her in a decent grave.”

She stood by her mother’s grave and something got into her. Her mother’s grave was carpeted in spring flowers: a simple grave in a simple graveyard at the end of the village near the place where the forest had reclaimed the iron mullah’s vanished mosque. She knelt at her mother’s graveside and felt the thing enter her, rapidly, decisively, as if it had been waiting below ground for her, knowing she would come. The thing had no name but it had a force and it made her capable of anything. She thought about the number of times her mother had died or been killed. She had heard the whole story now, a tale told by an old woman shrouded in black cloth about a younger woman sewn into a white shroud who lay below the ground. Her mother had left everything she knew and had gone in search of a future and though she had thought of it as an opening it had been a closing, the first little death after which came greater fatalities. The failure of her future and her surrender of her child and her return in disgrace had been deaths also. She saw her mother standing in a blizzard while the people among whom she had grown up treated her like a ghost. They had all killed her too, they had actually gone to the proper authorities and murdered her with signatures and seals. And meanwhile in another country the woman she would not name had killed her mother with a lie, killed her when she was still alive, and her father had joined in the lie so he was her killer too. Then in the hut on the hillside followed a long period of living death while death circled her waiting for its time and then death came in the guise of a clown. The man who killed her father had killed her mother too. The man who killed her father had been her mother’s husband. He killed her mother too. The cold weight of the information lay like ice upon her heart and the thing got into her and made her capable of anything. She did not weep for her mother not then nor at any other time even though she had believed her mother to be dead when in fact she had been alive and then believed her mother to be alive when she was already dead and now, finally, she had had to accept that her dead mother was dead, dead for the last time, dead in such a way that nobody could kill her anymore, Sleep, Mother, she thought by her mother’s graveside, sleep and don’t dream, because if the dead were to dream they could only dream of death and no matter how much they wanted to they would be unable to awake from the dream.

The day was drawing on and it would have been better to set off for the city while the light remained but she had things to see that needed to be seen, the meadow of Khelmarg where her mother made love to Shalimar the clown and the Gujar hut in the woods where he murdered her by cutting off her head. The woman in the burqa came with her to show her the way and the man who had fallen in love with her came too but they didn’t exist, only the past existed, the past and the thing that got inside her chest, the thing that made her capable of whatever was necessary, of doing what had to be done. She did not know her mother but she learned her mother’s places, her sites of love and death. The meadow glowed yellow in the long-shadowed late afternoon light. She saw her mother there, running and laughing with the man she loved, the man who loved her, she saw them tumble and kiss. To love was to risk your life, she thought. She glanced at the man who had driven her here, who evidently loved her although he had not yet had the courage to declare his love, and without meaning to she took a step back, away from him. Her mother had stepped toward love, defying convention, and it had cost her dearly. If she was wise she would learn the lesson of her mother’s fate.